Abstract

Steen L. Christiansen writes his book Drone Age Cinema (2017), “Contemporary cinema is entering the drone age…What will cinema be in the drone age?”. A very economical alternative way of capturing aerial shots for (low budget) documentaries, prosumer drones became available in Turkey and globally in 2015 and were quickly integrated into documentary film production. Before the emergence of prosumer drones, aerial shots were a luxury unaffordable for all but a few high-budget documentary film productions. Drones created a threshold in Turkish documentaries: gaze (exploration of geography-nature-life-people) from above, a Renaissance of the aerial shot. In this presentation / paper I will discuss the response to this new way of seeing in Turkish documentary cinema, and the ways in which drone shots have changed the cultural and technological environment of Turkish documentary cinema.